For some reason, I really got after it this weekend. It had nothing to do with Thanksgiving. I do not operate that way. Frankly, about this time of the year, I search for places to hide. I know that my wife is going to find excruciatingly unpleasant things for me to do (like have fun), so I try to find places to hide. It does me no good, of course, because she knows where all of my hideouts are, and I end up doing her bidding, anyway. But, this had nothing to do with that.

And, fortunately, it had nothing to do with chemotherapy and steroids. I simply got after it.

Really got after it.

After everything that has happened, and having a big strong young man living in the house as well (my son, for those of you who are even more deviant than me), I am not so much inclined to climb up ladders unless I have to. But I did. Cleaned the gutters all the way around the house. I am not saying I cleaned the ground of the detritus left behind, but I cleaned the gutters, and secured them where they needed securing. The detritus: that is what that big strong young man is for :).

I washed and dried every single piece of clothing in this household that needed such treatment, as far as I know (and yes, I even ventured into my son’s room, feeling more or less like Indiana Jones, among the relics and the booby traps).

I made the White Room a White Room again, rather than a parking place for my plants over the winter (by hiding my plants all over the house hoping that no one notices them and complains…and here’s the deal about that…I recommend cultivating plants highly. At the highest pitch of my own anxiety and panic, I found that growing plants, something I have never been able to do, suddenly seemed natural to me.

My father has a green thumb. My father-in-law worked in a damned greenhouse for the city, for crying out loud! He had a green thumb. Me? I could look at a plant and it would die. Maybe not right then, but as soon as I started to feel good about it, it would die. Once I talked to a plant and it killed itself, hanged itself with loose macramé that it tied, somehow, into a noose.

After the anxiety and the disease, something happened. Do not ask me what it was. I would answer Patience. That is as good as it gets with me. I stopped over-watering the little ladies and gentlemen, and also did not make them come crawling at my feet for water. We reached a happy medium. She was happy, but it took me and the plants awhile — and maybe that joke will take you awhile as well:).

We reached an agreement, how’s that? We decided that if I treated them more or less in a kindly manner, then they would do some splendid things for me in return. It was a good deal, and I took it, and it has paid dividends. Even my mother-in-law, whose husband was the greenhouse manager, asks me to come over and pot her plants. Something I need to do, by the way.

No nasty jokes, please. She is my mother-in-law, after all.

There is a down side to this. Is it not true that there really is a yin/yang going on in the universe? Do you want the bad news or the good news? I’m just wondering. Because when I learned how to grow plants, they started teaming up on me (and, more to the point, teeming up on me). Suddenly, the White Room, the fireplace room, the room of comfort and ease, was a tropical forest, and one that, other than me, people of supreme significance in my house, if you know what I mean and I think you do, were not so happy with.

Me? The first time I saw this room, I envisioned wooden benches with iron rails, foliage out the ass, a veritable garden of meditative delight. I was, alas, alone in that vision. For awhile. Cancer does buy you some leeway if you work it properly.

At some point, I suddenly had the room of my dreams (less the wooden benches with the iron rails, those replaced by a futon, but that’s a start). Jungle Room!

At some point this room was simply inundated with greenery! So much so that you could not even get to the coat rack that is also known as my exercise bike (my request), so much so that you could not get to my son’s friend’s golf clubs (those had to go). So much so that if you saw a book on the shelf that you had not yet read or wanted to revisit, you could not get to it! I was in a sort of botanical heaven.

Of course, I had to fix that. You cannot have a fire if such a thing will burn down the house. Plants must be moved, golf clubs must be moved, exercise bikes must be moved, even some stray books must be moved. But I digress, and I think only Proust, perhaps has had a larger parenthetical :)).

I cleaned out the White Room, and we can have a fire. As I mentioned to someone today, we could always have a fire in there, but now it will not be the kind that warrants attention from the authorities.

And it is getting cold.

I can’t wait! When we bought this house I told my wife, as we were searching, “You can have anything you want, but I have to have a fireplace and a deck.” Simple as that. I got all of that and more, but I digress again.

I’ve digressed so much that I’ve forgotten what we were getting into here. That happens to me a lot now. They say that Chemo Brain is the real deal. The professionals have now sanctioned us to be a bit ditzy following chemotherapy, and the first question you have to ask yourself is, why was I ditzy before they explained what it was? The second question, I suppose, is who do they think they are?

They are now saying that Chemo Brain, which they once thought might last for six months, then a year, and then two years (it is sort of like an auction, isn’t it? and I’ll bet that the big bidders are insurance companies) may, for some folks, have a permanent effect. That is no excuse to quit your job or act like an ass, unless you want to. Personally, I would save it for birthdays and anniversaries, when it really matters.

So, I got after it this weekend. I have the December thing coming up, and I do not know if that had something to do with it, but I was compelled to get things done, small things, mainly. My wife said, a compliment, I think, “I noticed your touch”. That could be good or bad. Did I leave a palm print on her, um, derriere?

No, she was talking about the little things that mean a lot, I hope. And I do not know why. Maybe this is the door back to reality and the real world and I am finally stepping back through it? Hello, world! If that is the case, it’s been awhile!

Maybe I am finally getting the effects of the last chemo, the surgery and the following infection and all that followed out of my system. I am prone to buy this theory, myself. Still: Hello, world!

I feel that I am back. I am being productive and alive. I like it.

December, I think, will seal the deal, but I am, for the moment, energized, and enjoying it.

The thing is, we moved. We moved from Texas, where all of my family was, to Virginia, where my wife’s mom and dad and brother were. The reason? Well, my wife was working at Baylor University’s hospital in Dallas, a highly respected institution, and could probably get a job anywhere in the country. More importantly, as she pointed out, we had gone my way for the entirety of our marriage, my parents had many grandchildren while hers had none but ours, and it was, simply, her turn.

I agreed.

It was probably either that or celibacy.

We moved, and I called around, and I got my daughter hooked up on a team with a lady coach who proved to be an excellent one for her at that time. The lady was fairly knowledgeable, had a daughter on the team but did not appear to show favoritism, and seemed to understand the relative significance of the game (which is to say that unlike me she did not think a loss would bring about the Apocalypse).

When I called seeking a team for my son, the guy that I talked to, the director of the league, asked if I had any coaching experience, and I answered, of course, “Well, um, not really. I was an assistant coach for my son’s team down in Texas last year, but…”, and he said, “Great! You are the coach!”

What?

Truly, I knew nothing about soccer. Nothing. Except what I have previously mentioned, that you kick the ball, that you try to put it into the goal.

But he was serious and he was insistent.

I was a coach :).

I was petrified :).

I am a perfectionist. When I was first told that in the fifth grade, I smiled, and my teacher, Mrs. Byers, just shook her head and said someday you won’t be so happy about that.

She was right. It can lead to anxiety and even panic attacks. It can lead to social anxiety, in particular, and depression, as I have since learned, much to my own dismay. But, on the other hand, it makes you one helluva coach :).

If I must say so myself, and I must, and I do.

I went immediately to the library and to soccer stores. I got books, got videos, saw some of the most boring junk you will ever witness on television: an hour on how to kick corners, all with an English accent and all to a guy that did not even know the importance of a corner kick at the time :).

But I hung in there.

I went to my first practice more nervous, I think, than I can ever remember being. Not because of the kids, of course, but the parents, my peers.

I know my voice was quavering when I addressed them. I told them I loved the kids but did not like them. I told them that they had the potential to rob their boys of a good time, among other things. I really did. Some mouths dropped, but not a word was spoken. I was what they had, and so they had to deal with it :).

Keep in mind, this is formerly bad parent numero uno! I was speaking from experience! 🙂

One parent, the one who became my assistant, told me that I had nothing to worry about: that teams in our area never won. Ha!

That was not hilarious at the time, but is now.

That first team, my first team, went 4-4 as I recall, in community soccer, where it is not supposed to matter. I will tell you that it always matters to me, and I do not apologize for that.

I have told my players, every single one I have ever coached, the first time we gather around before the first practice: Rule number one is to have fun. Rule number two is that winning is more fun than losing.

We take it from there :).

I moved on. I coached my son at a higher level. I coached my daughter on brief occasions. I coached outdoors, I coached indoors, I coached community, I coached select (advanced), I coached travel, I coached girls, I coached boys. I always succeeded. I did.

I should say that my players succeeded. Always. They did.

(I am allowing you to avoid me reciting the litany of every game, every win, every trophy, I was ever involved with, so be thankful :).

Both of my own kids moved past me. They moved to travel ball, to elite competition, and I felt no longer capable of coaching them. My coaching ‘career’ was done.

My daughter played travel ball and played for her high school team as a freshman. My son played travel ball at a younger age even than his sister, and played in England with his team. He started every game, played every minute of every game, as a freshman in high school. Unheard of.

Both were MVPs their senior years in high school. My daughter went on to play four years in college, and then coached in Europe! Both girls and boys, high school kids from around the globe. What an awesome experience that had to be! And she would write to me asking for advice on occasion, even though I am sure she did that to make me feel good.

My son played in adult league soccer when he was but 16 years old, and played, again, for the entirety of games. And he did not play on bad teams. Like his sister, he was offered a chance to play in college. In fact, he turned down a potential scholarship.

I am suggesting that this is why I am soccerfreaks. 🙂 The sport has been good to my family. It wrecked my son’s knee, to be sure, but by and large it has been very good to my family, and I encourage parents to get their children involved in this game. It will help them, frankly, if and when they decide to play other sports, simply because of the fitness required.

So there I am, going to my kids’ games, as an innocent spectator (amazing how you can turn back into a monster when you are simply dad again :)), when one of our family friends calls me to say that her daughter’s community team needs a new coach. They are six and seven year olds. I have not been there in awhile. I say okay, probably because I am a glutton for punishment.

I write a manifesto for the parents, describing what I expect from the players (six and seven year olds!), what I expect from the parents, and what they can expect from me.

As is usual, the kids love their previous coach and suspect me. It doesn’t get better, as I run them into the ground, to be honest with you. We work and we work and we work on fundamentals and on fitness. I think they hate it, but I am working for free :).

I am probably being too harsh on myself, maybe by an inch or so. Let us say that the parents did not complain, and that was good enough for me. Let us say that the girls hung in there and did everything I asked them to do without complaint, and that was good enough for me. Reputation carries you a long way I guess.

My son’s teams had been winners when I coached them. When I took my daughter’s abysmal high school team indoors, we won as well, totally unexpected. Reputation matters.

Even to the parents of six and seven year olds 🙂

I will shorten this again: We completely dominated in community league. We did not lose a game, won them all by huge margins, and parents from other teams, frankly, hated my guts.

I do not, never did, scream at my players in negative fashion. But I always have and always will scream encouragement to them. And I did so then. At that time, I had a great voice, in all modesty, and a loud one. One dad from another team made a point to walk in front of me with a bullhorn to speak to his team…I suppose he was the coach. I laughed at that and advised him about the rule that he stay on his half of the midfield line. If I sound like an ogre, I do not believe I was. I loved my girls, I wanted the best for them, I worked their butts off, and they deserved their rewards. I was happy to encourage them for their success.

I will never apologize for that.

Let me tell you this: when we decided it was time to move up a level, and learned that our youngest player (the one who actually sold me on the game of soccer…playing in goal and getting a drink of water while someone from the other team kicked a slow roller past her, and who, when I asked her at the half if the water was more important than preventing a goal simply smiled, all freckle-faced, to say, yes, it was) her parents petitioned HARD within the league and even in the newspaper for her to be able to continue playing for me. That was a very proud experience for me. They lost that battle, and she played in her age group, and went on to excel at a private high school academy, incidentally. I keep track of all of my kids.

I’m trying to bring this to a boil here.

Let’s cut to the chase: I took my little girls to the next higher level. We won. We were not supposed to, to quote that long ago boys’ assistant coach of mine. We were from the wrong end of town. While other teams’ tryouts had kids numbering in the 30s, 40s, 50s, mine had maybe one or two new kids :). It was a challenge, it was a blast.

And we won.

My arch-nemesis, to be fair, the lady coach of one of the teams in probably the wealthiest areas in the city, called me one night and asked if I was interested in a player she had no use for. I said, “Sure, give me a number.” The mom and I talked, and they came to our next practice. She was supposed to be a goalkeeper, and she was not all that good on the field otherwise, and on top of that, my girls were schooled well, if I can humbly submit, and they, in turn, schooled her that first night. They blistered her. Still, I could not turn down just one player trying out, so we took her.

And began her education :).

I cannot claim credit for this young lady’s success as a keeper. I cannot. Others have had a much bigger stake in that. But I took her onto my team, tried to teach her a few things, and she learned them, and she became a great keeper.

In our season-ending tournament one of those years, the Hampton Roads Girls Soccer Association tournament, the biggest tourney of our season, frankly, with teams coming from out of the area to play, in fact, something we were just getting used to, as we were not yet a travel team, it was starting to snow as we made our way to the final. Yes, we expected to be in the final, and there we were. I, of course, approached each game as if we were doomed, and somehow the ladies pulled me out :).

Officials decided we would not play. In order to let out-of-towners hit the road and avoid the snow (around here an inch is considered a major snowstorm), we would go immediately to penalty kicks. For those of you not in the know, this is a point where you choose five players from among those playing, to take a kick from a spot very close to the goal. The opponent does the same. It is difficult, even at that level, even among kids of that age, for a keeper to prevent opponents from scoring.

Ah, well. You play with the hand you are dealt.

Kristin, the keeper I referred to above as the player I kept, even when I had doubts about her abilities, stopped every single shot by the opposition. In the meantime, none of our key offensive players, the ones I chose to take those critical shots, could not get it past the other keeper either. My ace in the hole was Kristin. I had selected her to take our fifth and final kick, thinking that no one knows better than a keeper how to beat a keeper. She nailed it. We won. I got a heavy trophy to carry home, one I owe to her, and one I promised to give to her when I was told I was dying of cancer.

(You thought we would never get here, eh?)

Here’s the kicker (pardon the pun): when I was in bed, waiting to go into the hospital for my initial surgery for tongue and neck cancer, there was a wreath of angels surrounding my bed. My wife was there, as were a few of the soccer moms from that very team, and also a few of the players from that team, from what was, at this point, quite a few years ago. They were there for me, they had remembered me, and I was truly touched by this.

At the time, I was sedated to some extent, but I remember this moment, and remember telling them that I must have already died and gone to Heaven (do not go Christian on me, my friends :)) because I was surrounded by lovely angels.

The other night, Virginia Tech played Florida State in a quarterfinal of the ACC soccer tournament in, I think, Cary, NC. I have been there. My daughter played there more than once. Now, Kristin was there, a freshman, in goal, for the unranked and lowly seeded Hokies. She stopped one kick, another hit the crossbar, and Tech beat the Seminoles on PKs following a scoreless regular session and two sudden-death overtimes.

I wrote her and her parents to congratulate Kristin on her success and to let them know it reminded me of that HRGSA final so very long ago. Both Kristin and her mom wrote me back to say that they had thought of the same game, that game from so long ago, and that Kristin’s grandma had even been in tears as she recalled that game.

Next up was 12th-ranked Virginia, as I have indicated. This one was tied up, 1-1, after regular time, and after the two OTs. I watched both games on the internet, by the way and heard over and over again how this freshman keeper was making save after brilliant save.

She acted like it was HRGSA all over again, blocking shot after shot, unheard of at this level. I have never seen anything like it, personally, not at this level of play, not against this level of competition, not in this kind of pressure environment. Never.

Tears were rolling from my eyes. I have lived to see one of my players make it, and to make it to my alma mater, and to carry them where they have never been before. I always wore maroon and orange to practices back then:). I always told them they would play for Tech one day, even though Tech didn’t even have a women’s soccer program back then.

One of them has done it.

It brought me to tears. I lived to see it. It brought me to tears.

I cannot forget lying in that bed, with her and others surrounding me, in semi-darkness, wondering if I was already gone, wondering if I would ever see them again, and certainly never expecting to see what I saw tonight.

To be straight up front, I am wondering how this salsa con queso is going to deal with me after I’ve had some sleep. I do not know. It is Medium, which would be no problem for the great majority of you, but it is pretty much cutting edge for me. We will see.

If I bleed to death that way, I suppose it would be poetic justice.

Meanwhile, we are talking about death and dying. I was told in June of 2007 that I had 10 months to live, maybe more, but to expect nothing more. Ten months.

I’ve mentioned that.

I was dying. The strangest thing is that while the initial announcement blew me away, I was not truly overwhelmed by this. My wife was. My daughter was. My son in law was. But I sort of shrugged my shoulders and said, okay, let’s move on.

But you have already read this story.

The real story is this: they were wrong.

I wasn’t dying. I had one small node in my lung, not the shotgun pellets they first thought were there. And I was not dying.

Even when they decided to take that one node out of my lung, I was not dying.

But my father-in-law was. Imagine that! My wife, as a nurse, is permitted to sleep in my room every night, and all of a sudden her dad is in extreme duress in another hospital!

She works her magic, and gets him shipped to the same hospital I am in, her hospital, but it takes forever, and I think I am out before he even gets there.

She is staying with me, night and day, day and night, and still trying to find time to see her dad, and to care for her mom, who can’t drive anymore, and her brother, who has Cerebral Palsy but does very well with it, and now her dad is in the hospital, close to death, apparently, as is her husband, suffering from a staph infection that they are still trying to figure out.

She is a busy lady.

Oh yeah, and she is trying to get some hours in, too.

It turns out that I get out before her dad. I went in before him, but I get out before him too. The real irony is that I went into the OR for my second operation, for the staph infection, the same night he went to the ER at another hospital. My wife thought, ok, he (me) is going into surgery and then into ICU…I can sleep at home tonight with the dogs (no comments please). And then she is alerted that, that very night, her dad is in the ER at another hospital.

Wouldn’t want to be her!

My wife said later that the only time she feared for my life was during the staph infection business. She is the nurse so I will take her word for it. There was no fearing for her dad. She fought with doctors and whomever, but he was not coming out of it. COPD. Look it up.

I went to see him, as I was out of the hospital and walking again, and he wasn’t looking good at all. He would die within 48 hours I think. I held his hand, told him that I would take care of his little girl, and that I would take care of his wife and his son. It would get done.

He was not comatose. I think he knew what I was saying. He squeezed my hand more than once.

We didn’t start off so well, Harv and me. His daughter was too young for someone like me, or so he thought (she was legal, folks!). Maybe it was my age (I was three years older than her…she was 10 and I was 13); maybe it was the suits…he didn’t seem to like the suit types; maybe it was that I was quitting a job where I had just been promoted to assistant manager, so that I could go up to New Hampshire and write the Great American Novel. Oh, yeah, probably that last one.

I do not blame him. Now that I am a parent, I do not blame him.

He would ‘go to bed’ before 5 PM if I was coming over for dinner, just to avoid me. I thought it funny.

There are lots of other good parts of this story; suffice it that he came to love me. I took care of his daughter, I loved his daughter, she had a roof over her head, she ate well enough, we had his grandchildren. Whatever it was, he came to love me, and I came to love him.

And then, in the midst of my own problems, he died.

He gave me a ponytail palm not too long before I ended up in the hospital. It was like getting Excalibur handed to me directly from King Arthur. That’s what it felt like to me. I truly loved the man. No pretense, no BS. Just Harv.

And now, no Harv.

To this day, I do not know how my wife did it, how she handled it all emotionally. But she did, and so did her mom, and so did her brother, who worried me most.

Part of it, I thought, was that she was too busy with me to give it too much thought. I now think I was wrong. I think that as you get older you learn to grieve differently. Young people tend to think it is the end of the world, while older folks have been there and done that, that sort of thing, not to shortchange the grief. We simply know better how to deal with it as we mature and experience it.

I am not saying that it is ever easy.

I do miss the man. I held his hand there, in that hospital room, while his eyes stared out into space. He was leaving, and I knew it. But, unlike my mom, I am almost certain that he could hear me, and that when he squeezed my hand he was answering me. He knew I was telling him that I now had the watch, if you will, for his wife and his son. I would take care of them. He could trust me to do that. He knew that. He squeezed my hand.

And, a day or so later, he died.

I am done talking about death. I have overdone it probably, even though I really feel like I have not even hit on the salient points. But enough of death. We are not about death but about life. I needed to talk about death for myself, and for all of those caregivers who are fearful of losing someone or who have lost someone. I felt compelled to talk about it and to give it its due.

But enough of it. Let us move on, celebrating the fact that we are alive, surviving.

I had a rather unusual experience this evening. My wife was standing next to me (she does that from time to time), looking with great excitement at some photographs she had just had developed. It turns out that they were a few years old, but only now developed. That happens to us. I am still looking for the rolls I took in Europe, Paris in particular. They were probably confiscated by the Thought Police at the airport in Brussels, but that is another story for another time.

She is standing next to me and giggling and laughing and doing her “Oh, my God!” thing when she sees something that really delights her, while I am busy going through the second set of photos from the batch. It is clear to me that they are older, but I do not know how old. I just know that I see her dad in a lot of them. And none of me. I notice things like that, not that I am a vain man :).

When she starts to cry, and I mean really cry, when she lays the pictures down and starts to leave the room, I stop her and ask, “Is it your dad?”. He passed away earlier this year, and I am thinking that some photo has set her off, some tender, some sentimental moment has really gotten to her.

She is speechless. Literally unable to speak, and beginning to blush, she is so upset. She is shaking her head, she has put the pictures down, she has a hand to her mouth, very upset, and I am trying to guess at what upset her, about to pick up the pics and find out for myself when she picks them back up to deny me the end of my curiosity.

I am concerned for her, and continue to ask her what could possibly be making her this upset. It is sort of like a game show, to be honest, and would be funny if it were not so serious. I keep bringing up names and situations and she keeps shaking her head, No, with her hand to her mouth and the tears flowing.

Finally, she settles down a bit, takes a deep breath, if you will, lays the pictures back down, with the exception of two, and says, rather shakily, “Picture of you.”

Picture of me? I didn’t know I looked that bad. Ever! Even now! 🙂

I ask, in fact, “You mean after this last surgery?” (when I felt I looked like a concentration camp survivor, albeit sans tattoo, said with the deepest respect for those who actually lived through it or did not, but as the best description I can think of for how I looked with my rather emaciated body, hair loss, etc.).

She shook her head again and said hesitantly, “After the first.”

The first? The first was three years ago! And I didn’t look so bad after that one! You can look at my picture on this site. I mean, I may not be Paul Newman (okay, he’s dead now, so bad choice, but you catch my drift), but I’m nothing to cry over (am I?).

So I finally get to see the pic and it is me in the hospital, in a bed, head resting between some sort of stabilizers, foam on either side of those, most of chest covered with the ubiquitous butt-crack robe but enough showing to show some bleeding. Trickling blood is always eerier, somehow, isn’t it? It appears it is running down from my neck to under my garment. There is more, of course, but that is the blood I notice first. Lower part of head is swollen, there is a trache with a serious attachment to it, and there is even some sort of garrote-looking piece of wire or something wrapped completely around my neck.

I suppose that is there to keep my head together :). Sounds funny as I say it, but I speculate that it is so. I see no other reason for it but to help maintain my immobility, perhaps.

What I notice, beyond the blood and the trache and the line ‘drawn’ down my lower face from bottom lip nearly to chest before it veers off to the left, what I notice beyond the fact I am sleeping and being garroted at the same time, what I notice beyond the tubes and swelling and monitor attachments, is that I have hair! I have a moustache and lots of curly brown hair!

Those days seem so long ago :).

I WAS a bit overweight, even beyond the swelling, but, geez, I was a rather handsome lad, if you take away the swelling and the new chin/neck ‘tattoo’ and the tracheand the blood and all of that :).

It did not make me cry. It made me interested. I looked at every small detail in that photo, down to the color of the sheets and the way someone apparently moved my robe a bit to cover my breast before the photo was taken. (Danged censors! :))

But I wasn’t there. Someone who was, someone who feared for my life, found this photo disturbing. I guess you had to be there, and I wasn’t. Whatever else you see in this photo, you can be sure you will notice that my swollen eyelids are covering my eyes, that I am asleep or in that induced unconsciousness that some of us shorten to ‘coma’.

Not to continue to beat on that drum, but these caregivers, they sure go through a lot.

First, as a caregiver, it is devastating to feel out of control. I know of no worse feeling than the feeling that I cannot fix things. Or that things cannot be fixed by somebody.

I think that is why we sometimes lash out at those who are trying most to help us or our loved ones. It is because we are not in control as we want to be and, damn it, they must not be doing their jobs right, because we could certainly fix it if we had their tools and their training.

Second, we are, many of us, lucky even to be here this long. Death tried to grab us on numerous occasions and barely missed. Sure, we can continue to fight and should, but we should also be thankful that we have made it this far. I will wager that no one who read the first three parts of this did not think to himself or herself, “Yeah, well, I could tell stories, too.”

Because you could. More importantly, you CAN. You are still here. You still have hope. And hopefully, you still have humor.

But, again, I digress.

If we can all agree that death is a bummer subject, and I think we can, I am about to move into more bummer territory.

I’m pretty sure I told you about my friend who killed himself because he realized he was gay. That was a supreme tragedy. The young man was gifted. He was an absolutely beautiful young man, both externally and internally, a veritable Adonis who was also an artist and one of the kindest young men you would ever care to meet. But clearly troubled and then dead, by his own hand. We did not know he was gay.

I may or may not have told you about my wife’s best friend’s brother, also gay, who died of AIDS. I went to see him when we visited for Christmas, long before it was acceptable to believe that you would not simply die by looking at someone with AIDS. And I asked him what it felt like. I can be ghoulishly honest, I suppose, but he was kind about it. We talked about death. He was afraid, of course, but not like I might have thought. I believe he was in too much anguish to fear it greatly.

This is why I promote pain management, by the way. When you are in too much pain, you simply want to give up, and I don’t blame you. Any doctor that doesn’t understand this deserves to have his or her license taken away. Pain management is fundamental to cure, to well-being, to the will to survive.

Sean’s death (the AIDS friend) did not impact me so much as his last days did. I admired his courage and even his resignation, I admired his love for his partner and for his family. There was much to admire about what was going on, but I did not know him well enough to be deeply affected by his death.

My mom’s death, of course, was another story altogether.

I am the oldest of six children, four boys and two girls. Dad was in the Navy for the entirety of my youth, which means he spent much time at sea, seemingly six months of every year, although I know it was not really that frequent. But it is true that after a certain number of us popped up, if you will, he also began to take on extra work to keep us fed and clothed and living in houses large enough for the entire brood, even if that meant some bunking up, and it did.

That was never a problem, as my brother and I, living in the same room for much of our youth, even into teen-hood, became closer maybe than most siblings do (no Deliverance jokes, please).

The point to be made, though, is that mom pretty much raised us for large parts of time. My mom suffered from Grand Mal epilepsy in addition to chronic anemia, perhaps brought on by the drugs she was taking for the epilepsy. That is out of my purview, for sure. What is not out of my purview is the recognition that she did a great job. None of her sons or daughters are in prison or dead. Yet. Yes, one or two or three, maybe even all four of the boys, spent a night or two in jail on one occasion or more, I cannot say for sure, and yes, one of the daughters married an older man who would be considered a pedophile of sorts today, as she was only 16 when this married man lured her into his clutches (but they are still married today with three boys all grown and moving on), but she really did a great job.

In 1974, in the fall, in the winter, I think, I was in college, six hours away back then, when my dad called and I answered on the lounge phone in the dorm and was told that mom had breast cancer. I was advised to stay at school, that she would want that and that there was nothing I could do by coming home. So that is what I did. I do not regret the choice. There is very little that I regret, I suppose because it does no good to do so. But I certainly did not regret this one.

When I came home, the woman that was my mother, the woman who was my mom, she seemed fine. They had taken a chain saw to her, or so it would later appear when I got a look at the wounds, but they meant well, and did well, for the times. Reconstruction was not yet a word, except as it related to rehabilitating the deep south. She lived with the scars and the lack of that breast, at a time when little was understood or accepted about it. And she did so for a good 20 years following.

Never a complaint, never a mention of it. We didn’t even think about cancer. It was over, it was done with, a chapter in the past. That was it.

Such were the times, such were my parents, such was my mom.

End of discussion.

And then, in the midst of what should have been a comfortable time in later years, there in what to me was the lap of luxury, with the tournament pool table, the in-ground pool, the coy pond, the Bayliner, the Cadillac, there in the midst of that came ovarian cancer.

Cancer, I am sure I have noted, is an equal opportunity employer. It was coming for mom. She fought it. She fought it valiantly. Fought it so valiantly that it did not kill her. No. She went for treatments and the doctors would hand over their dollars for the bets they’d lost on football games (lucky for her, the Cowboys were winning at the time) and she would make the staff smile, make those around her smile. Life goes on, she was saying, and so it did.

Until the breast cancer came back, not in her breast, but in her brain. After all of those darned years, BC decided to return, and to do so in grand fashion. She fought this too.

But I was finally called down to Texas. Mom was dying. When my family and I got there, she was sitting out back next to the pool, cool as a cucumber, anxious to see us. She was not, after all, dying.

And when, less than a month later, I was called back, I went alone, and there she was, again, in the exact same chair, in the exact same spot, with the exact same attitude, waiting for me.

You have to be impressed with that. She was not going to die on our watch. My dad even said, “When you come, she comes alive.”

The third time, I also went alone. This time was different. This time, mom was lying on a gurney in the den. She was in a coma. I talked to her, I held her hand, I stroked her face, but I do not know if she knew any of that. I wondered if I had taken the previous visits for granted. How much time did I spend playing pool or shooting darts when I could have been with her on the patio?

She seemed so well, it seemed natural, part of coming home, part of being one of the boys, a bad habit we have in my family.

This time, this was the real deal, and it was too late to undo any past lapses, so I ignored them. I slept beside her gurney, holding her hand when I was standing over her, always in her presence. And sometime during the night, she died.

My dad woke me. Keep in mind that I was a 35+ year old man by now. He spoke with more tenderness than I had ever heard from him, and he said, “Joey, she’s gone.”

I got up, I kissed her on the cheek, I went out into the pool room and got a beer and slugged it down.

THAT is what I did. I kissed my mom on her cold dead cheek, squeezed her hand, I am sure, and then I drank a beer quickly.

The rest of the morning is not a blur as the cliche would suggest happen next, but is rather worthless to talk about. The Medical Examiner came, he confirmed she was dead (and he gets the big bucks!), and he advised my sisters to beware of any strangers in their breasts.

He was nice enough but you are bound to find fault in such a person that comes to tell you that your mother is dead, you are bound to want to beat him up, in fact, even though he is just the final messenger. No one beat him up, and arrangements had to be made.

It was early still, too early for newspapers to be awake, for funeral homes to be awake, and so some of us played pool, drank lots of beer, while my mom’s dead body lay in the next room. This is true. I never thought about it before now. I knew, I mean, that I went out and did those things, but never put it together with my mom being in the next room. I think I am wrong, in fact. I think the ME took her away. Yes he did. But she was still in there for me, for us. And we drank and played pool and shot darts and got as wasted as we could get at such an early, dark hour.

There were things to do, of course. I had to call the newspaper with an obituary, haggle over words per dollar and the cost of a picture and all of that. I never dreamed that would be part of a death, certainly not the death of my mom. So, I’m in an internal rage mode talking to some lady about what it will cost to do this or that and not knowing what my dad has in mind for all of this, and it is simply surreal. It is outside of any form of reality I might imagine.

My mom has died! Does the world know? Does the world care? Do dollars matter? Do column inches matter? It is all unreal, bizarre to me. How am I to do this in the midst of my pain and loss?

But of course, that is the intent, I think, to divert me from my pain and loss. Later, my dad would say, one of you is not done with this. I think he meant me, my mom’s oldest, the one that ‘took after her’ as they said.

My mom was buried fairly quickly. I came to think that all people were supposed to be buried that quickly, but it is not so. My father-in-law has since passed away and I know that arrangements can be made so that others can make time to be there for services. In our case, my mom was not given the opportunity for far-off loved ones to make it. The service was small and cheap, frankly, and I was disappointed, as were others.

I still do not know the reason for that. I know that she later received a much better reception from all of her children but me. I am thankful for that. I also know, though, that grieving is for the living. The dead do not know how we treat them, how we memorialize them, how we praise them.

They are gone.

My mom had a quirky sense of humor. My dad was Mr. Right. Everything should be in place and all should be as others of our social level would expect. That sort of thing. Mom had an Elvis clock that she put up in the den. Be advised that this den was filled with rich, rich leather, a beautiful fireplace, a magnificent gun case. And there was Elvis, up on the wall, keeping time.

A trip to the bathroom led to The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You as you unrolled the toilet paper. That was my mom.

I miss her greatly. But I do not think about her daily, and I do not mourn her daily. Even at holidays and birthdays, I honestly do not think of her. I do not think I am evil, but normal. Talking to someone in the last couple of days, she remarked that her grandkids didn’t understand why she didn’t seem more remorseful at her mom’s passing. I said that youth do not understand that as we get older we learn to grieve differently. She agreed.

The thing is, grief is a selfish thing. Have I already said this? It is for the living. It is understandable and useful, but let us not forget that it is for us, the living. In that way, we can move on with our lives, rather than wallowing in self-pity and deep regret.

I am not, lately, known as a social person. Since the tongue and neck thing, in particular, I have tried, and I think at first I did a good job with it, but eventually, and with the things that followed, I sort of closed up a bit.

There is always eating involved, principally, and that is, or can be, awkward for me. For a time, even drinking was an issue. Still, I made it out there, hung out with my friends, did what I could to fit in.

Eventually, though, it became, not too much, but not enough. Or both. I am not sure. I was frustrated with being treated like I was normal when I certainly was not, and at the same time I was frustrated with being treated like I was different, which, in fact, I was, to some degree, but not enough to be treated that way.

It was an interesting dichotomy, to be sure, but a frustrating thing to live with.

I chose the wrong thing, and not on purpose, but just by happenstance. I began to turn down offers to go with my wife to functions. Watching people eat almost killed me. It was hard to bear, to be honest, to smell the food, to see it, to savor it and not be able to eat it. But that is just an excuse, really.

It is a good one, don’t get me wrong. There is not much tougher than sitting at a table burdened with bounty and people piling a bunch of it on their plates while you are, at some point, not even allowed any more to smell it :).

I ignore that dictate, by the way, whenever I want to. The wife just thinks she controls me :).

But it is true that I have tended to avoid social occasions. Avoid? Hell! I have run in the opposite direction!

The food thing is one thing, maybe the critical one. The other is that I look like I am dying, in my humble opinion, even though I am purportedly not doing so now. I am underweight and working on that, I’ve lost some hair, and the hair I have is gray. I am not being fashion-conscious here, folks, but simply telling you that I already had two strikes against me for my friends: he can’t eat and he looks like he is dying.

That tends to freak people out, more so if they care about you.

Oh, and strike three? I have an anxiety issue, something that came up before the cancer, so I cannot blame it on that, but it was under control prior to the cancer, and is now back pretty much in full force.

I have not been a social person.

Last night, Thursday night, my wife hosted a party for her business women’s group. I frankly went to this room, which my son calls the Bat Cave, and hung out for much of the night. I do not think most men would blame me for that. Who, after all, wants to hang out with a bunch of ladies, most of them elderly, eating and chirping and cackling?

Not me. Not my son. He came to me for refuge. I had none for him, so he went to bed :).

Eventually, though, I did go out. I took some pictures. One lady, I think the youngest of them, was dressed in normal attire and carrying a sign that said NUDIST ON STRIKE. I thought it was cheap but clever, and spent much of the rest of the evening trying to renegotiate her contract, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

They are wonderful women, all of them, don’t get me wrong. They have shown their concern for me, and especially for my wife, throughout this shared ordeal. There was, however, a World Series game on, and the only one of them who truly intrigued me was the nudist on strike, and I tried all of my tricks but could not get her to take her clothes back off. I even walked by where they were sitting, a load of clothes in my hand, and asked if she wanted me to wash hers while I was at it.

She paused, I think before saying no. Perhaps I am projecting.

That was last night, Thursday night. Tonight, Friday night, was OUR party, our friends, if we had any, our rules, all of that.

I did not know what or who to be. I wanted to be the Joker. The pathos is there, no matter who plays the guy. And the makeup is easy :).

A rodeo clown was suggested, and that is close enough to the Joker without being so tragic that maybe I should have done that.

What I did, though, was to worry.

It has been more than three years since we had a real party at my house.

I mean, by real, we have had relatives here, we have had friends here, but we have not had a gathering of folks of any numbers since a Fourth of July the very year I was told I had tongue and neck cancer.

Between then and now, there has been so much going on, so much weakness on my part, so much chaos, so much of everything, really, that we have never even considered such a thing.

And then there is me. Hiding out in the Bat Cave, the Man Cave, as one friend likes to call it.

I am not blaming this on cancer, by the way. I had the anxiety and panic and all of that long before the cancer. I took care of it, had a successful professional career, in fact, and the cancer only brought it back. My bad. I will fix it. I am fixing it.

In the meantime, as tonight approached, I went into a sort of stasis. I had ignored advice to get a costume or to buy the stuff to make myself into something, and now here we were.

In case you don’t know, I have an adversarial relationship with the mask I wore during my radiation. They screwed me down to a table inside of that thing and strapped my hands down and had their way with my head and neck. It sucked. If you are a head/neck cancer survivor reading this, let me tell you: it sucks.

I hated it, and, yet, I kept it. I have read of a bunch of others who did the same. Some throw theirs away, but a lot of people keep them. I kept mine. But I will tell you, it has been like having a Chucky doll in the house :). I am halfway afraid that it is going to come alive and do me more evil.

That is foolish, of course. But it is also foolish to retain the danged thing, don’t you think?

What possible good comes from keeping it?

Until Halloween.

(When it is not Halloween, the mask is in the deepest recesses of a closet that I rarely even open, I assure you. I hate that danged thing!)

I have put it out in a window for the last couple of years, and my wife says I am a sick pup for doing so. She may be right. One thing for sure, it is not going on MY face.

Until we are having a party and I don’t have a costume and the guests have started arriving, the early ones, and are fairly well decked out.

I ask my wife to blacken my eyes, (not in the usual way :)), and I put fake blood around my mouth. Please note for future reference that I said fake blood.

It takes me awhile, but I stuff my mask into a hoodie (a sweatshirt with a hood, for all of you who are of my generation), and I wear it, and it is, frankly, modestly, looking pretty darned good. It is incredibly scary, even before I add the tears of fake blood from the eyes.

Not bad, if I must say so myself, and I must, because the wife is pretty hacked that I did not plan in advance, and probably even more hacked that I was able to bail out so easily :).

It really is scary. Maybe just to me, I don’t know, but it scares the heck out of me. I look in a mirror, and I want to cry.

A problem develops fairly quickly, however: beverages are hard to put into your mouth through a mask of this sort, and when a straw is suggested, I scoff at the notion. No man drinks a beer through a straw! (Well, my brother in law does, but he has CP, so he is forgiven the transgression.)

This means that I am putting the thing back on when people arrive, and then taking it off, then putting it on, then taking it off. You get the idea.

(I hope.)

So, I put the black stuff around the eyes, and I put some fake blood around my mouth and on the mask, and I am good to go, and all of a sudden, there is a plop.

A plop.

A bit of blood drops onto my hand. What? I know I smeared that fake blood pretty well, and I know I didn’t put any on my ear.

But here it is again! Plop. Plop.

I go to the bathroom, and I locate the source, behind my ear, or so it seems, but everytime I wipe it away, it reappears. I am thinking, already, of my wife’s advice that I have ignored, and knowing that I cannot let her know this is happening, that I think, ironically enough, that I have real blood on Halloween night. But I would rather be wrong than dead, so I walk out to the kitchen and say, Corrine, can you look at this?

She does. To her credit, she only makes one “I told you so” remark. We (she) do some things to fix it and finally just bandage the ear. Turns out my old mask got me one more time.

That is irony. In my land.

I couldn’t wear my mask anymore, and that is probably a good thing. It was prohibiting drinking anyway. Beyond that, I hate the danged thing.

The party went very well after that. A young lady came in with a kid I once coached in soccer (and ran him out of the sport altogether :)) and she was dressed provocatively in a little Bo Peep or Raggedy Anne costume, and I kept telling her that her shoes were untied, hoping that she would bend over. She caught on to me immediately, of course, but eventually, thinking she was fooling me, bent over front facing me, not realizing what I could see that way.

I am sick. I admit it.

My friends were there.

Most of them.

I don’t know what to do with the mask.

It can still bring tears to my eyes, just to look at the danged thing. I should probably throw it away, but the real Halloween is only a week away, and now it is really scary.

Not as scary, of course, as what will happen if Little Bo Peep takes me up on my offer to fly off to Mexico together :).

A friend of mine, a fellow cancer survivor, apparently had some time on her hands and created a marvelous desktop for me. Among the shooting stars, the wagons, the scooters, and all of that, there are three pictures of my grandson.

In one, he is dressed rather nicely, but strapped into a government-approved safety seat and sleeping. You can see the bruises on his face. If he was awake, and if he could talk, he would probably be saying, yeah, but you should see the other guy!

And she would probably agree.

But he looks rather gentlemanly, and in his sleep looks like a perfect angel.

Another of the pictures shows him screaming for all that his lungs can give. That is not the angel. But it is my boy. He will sing like grandpa did. And like his mom did, too!

The third is not the best, by any means, but it makes me smile every time I log in. He is smiling, all six or seven weeks worth of him, and I am telling you, he looks strong.

He IS strong. Last night, not for the first time, my daughter called, so that I could listen to Scooter while he was in a talkative mood. When I first came on, he was still talking, of course. When I started to respond, of course, he clammed up. As his mom said (she used to be Erin, but now she is Scooter’s mom :)) he was just staring at the phone, enamored of it, I guess.

Eventually, as I talked and sang, he began to speak. I cannot tell you that I had anything to do with that. It may be that they were tickling his feet or making faces or something. But from my end of the line, I can tell you that I talked and sang, and even sang him our special song, and he started to talk again. He tallked a LOT in fact. I am not quite sure what he was saying. I am still trying to figure that out. We will get there.

But he was talking to grandpa, to G-Pa (my new rap title).

I do not need a reason to live, but if I did, this would be a good one.

I cannot make the smooching sound, I cannot pucker up and plant one, I cannot kiss.

I cannot whistle either, and I used to be a danged good whistler. But that is not as big as not being able to kiss. Everyone should be able to kiss, and I cannot kiss.

Whatever they did to me that first go-round, they took away my ability to kiss.

I have tried to kiss my grandson, and I cannot do it. I purse my lips, I move them, and suddenly I realize that I cannot kiss him. I can slobber on him. I can touch his soft sweet face with my lips, for sure, and I have. But I cannot kiss him.

I should work on it.

In the meantime, I am very lucky.

When my wife and I started hanging out together, if you know what I mean and I think you do, I advised her that she did not know how to kiss. Like a great number of people, I suspect, she kissed in a hard, closed-lip fashion. We worked on that and we corrected it.

(Am I anal or what?)

A kiss, in my opinion, then and now, should be soft, succulent, receiving and giving. Corrine was a quick study.

So was my wife.

JUST JOKING! Corrine is my wife.

The thing is, we can kiss. It is because she is succulent, receiving, and giving. I am not trying to be erotic here, although I am about to leave this paragraph in mid-sentence and run off to bed!

No.

Isn’t that amazing though? We can kiss. I cannot even kiss my own grandson, not really, but every time I kiss my wife, I know that it is a real kiss, and I feel it, and I savor it, and I know that I am a part of it. And I know that it is because I taught her how to kiss.

That sounds funny. I know. But no one kisses like her. Well, I mean, probably :).

Wow. Never thought I’d get caught making a Rod Stewart reference! Times do change!

I am still not a fan of his, do not get me wrong, but the line is so appropriate to what I want to write about.

I could have used Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E, or any number of love ’em and leave ’em songs, but I think none bring quite the zing as one that says, hey get up, I have something to say, and you are not going to like it, not quite like this one.

Okay, there are better songs but not better lines. Let’s not argue that point. Let’s leave it at that.

The deal is, we are talking about someone just deciding that it is time to leave. In our case, the reason is cancer.

I hear it, or read it, all of the time. Let’s get something straight right away, however: it is not the norm but the exception. If you have been following along, you know that most caregivers hang in for the long haul. Why, I do not know. But they do.

Okay, I suspect I know. I suspect that they actually love us, believe it or not. I know! It took me awhile to buy into that, too! But I think it’s true! How else would they put up with us, I ask you, even if you are the best looking woman or man on the planet, even if you do make a million or two every month or so. Caring for cancer survivors sucks. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. If they are hanging, they are loving, folks.

They are loving me, they are loving you. We have a hard time accepting that. We think we are deformed or something, we think we are weak and we think we are frail, but no, we are loved.

However…

Sometimes the other one, the expected caregiver, that person bolts. A husband, a wife, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, hell, even parents, even friends, it’s amazing, sometimes, who bolts.

Someone said to me that they didn’t blame them for being afraid of cancer, and I replied, “They are not always afraid of cancer. They are often afraid of tragedy.”

That is so true. We were talking of all of them, all who head for the door when you find out you have cancer and who never come back. It is not because they think you are contagious, sometimes, but because their concern for you is beyond their ability to cope.

Can you understand that? I just now figured it out.

Really.

When my mom died, I was in the den where she was lying on a gurney when it happened. I was sleeping on the floor next to her when my dad woke me and said she was gone. We woke the rest of the family, of course, and I remember little of the rest of that morning, that dark morning, except for the medical examiner coming and warning my sisters about breast cancer, except about us ending up out in the pool room, shooting pool and shooting darts and drinking beer while we waited for what was to come. Except for my dad’s ominous note that one of was not yet dealing with this and would know later, or some such.

It was me, I think. He was talking about me. My mom’s oldest son (and his too), all of that, and how I seemed to shrug it off and move on immediately when it happened. It was me. I think.

And so we come back to it: removing ourselves from tragedy. And how we do it. And what the consequences are, down the road. Not just for the survivor, but for the caregivers.

I think I broadened the scope of this without meaning to. Let me get back on point.

First, if a spouse or significant other leaves in your most critical time, it is probably a good thing. It is probable that cancer was not the real issue, and it is likely that you are better off without that person in your life.

Think about that, if you will. You have lived with this person, I presume, in a relationship based on trust, and suddenly he or she is gone. Where is the trust?

Most people I know who have gone through this are fairly insistent that it was the best thing that could have happened to them. It was NOT the cancer, it was the relationship that was bad. In an odd way, the cancer saved them, allowed them to live thereafter free of a poor union. I am serious. If you were in such a relationship, please consider this, that the disease may have helped you in the long run.

Second, cancer does scare people, and most often it is the fear of tragedy, as I mentioned above. It may not be a lack of love that makes them run but an abundance of it. That may sound wishy-washy, but consider it. Talk about it, if it is not too late. Some people are not tough enough to handle tragedy, some people love too much to handle it. Consider it.

I am not being sentimental here. I mean it. Many of us run from tragedy. Not from cancer, but from tragedy.

It doesn’t make it right (or wrong) but it makes some things make more sense for some of us.

It is, of course, all the more reason to admire the ones who stick it out and who do whatever needs to be done to carry us through. There is no doubt about that, and I am not making excuses for the ones who bolt.

Okay, I am. To some degree.

Mostly, though, if they bolt, there were other issues. That is the bottom line. Cancer became an excuse in most cases, and you are better off without the guy or gal who bolted.

The friends thing, that gets right back to the tragedy effect. When your friends seem to leave you in droves, it is not your breath, it is not that you are contagious (although some of them seem to act like you are and may even believe it). No. Most of the time it is that fear of tragedy.

They do not want to see you die. They do not want to see you dying. Can you blame them? Hell yeah.

But still, it’s a valid excuse, and one they will not use in public or to you directly. Some of them run because they do not want to be a part of the demise of someone they care for, someone they love. And they do not understand cancer, just as you did not when it first entered your life, so they assume that you will die, just as you did when you first heard you had cancer. And, thus, they run.

Can you blame them?

Of course you can.

But it will do you no good.

Others, it is true, are not happy about the potential inconvenience. Root them out, if they do not root themselves out (they will) and lose them immediately. Those who love and care for you will be there for you, regardless.

When I was going through the radiation following my first surgery in October of 2005, soccer moms and family friends made a point to get on the schedule, to pick me up in the morning to get me to my favorite sport, wearing the death mask. They waited for me, they took me home afterwards.

You learn who your friends are.

I’m not sure I got this right. I may need to revisit it. Something tells me I strayed back again to myself when I was trying to talk about others.

Yesterday, I was tasked with going to baby sit my grandson, Scooter. He is my only grandson, and he is a young one at that, about nine weeks old. My own children include his mother, who is, well, a woman, and so I will not give out her age, and her younger brother, five years younger, who is 24. 🙂

I was nervous about this, to be honest, and I will get into that, but first I should probably explain why I think it even merits time on this site.

Last June, that is, in June of ’07, I was told I had “a minimum” of 10 months to live. My daughter and her husband were in the room when OncoMan said that. Onco Man was wrong, as you can clearly see. But he meant well. (Well, actually, he was right, wasn’t he? I mean, I did have a minimum of 10 months to live. At the time, though, we took him not so literally, I guess you could say, and I suspect that his intent was different as well.)

In the meantime, my daughter, working on her masters’ degree at one of the top universities in the country for her field, and my son-in-law, who is working his way steadily up the Army chain of command, had long ago decided they would have children when they got the hard work out of the way.

My diagnosis changed that.

They can say what they want (and they have not disputed that notion), but they immediately, obviously, began doing the rabbit thing. My daughter started testing, and you know, probably better than me, what all of that is about these days. In my time, we made whoopee and it pretty much led to poopie.

That’s as polite as I can be about the subject.

They worked hard, apparently, but also, apparently, enjoyed the task. Let’s not go there. I am her dad. I am not his dad (we do not live in West Virginia…JUST JOKING!!!!)

Ten years ago, the very thought might have led me to homicide, soninlawicide, whatever they call it. But no. Now I am older, wiser, and more dying or so I was told. So I appreciated the effort. They wanted me to see their child before I passed away, and they wanted him or her to see me too, I think, before I passed away. I was not averse to the idea, myself, to be honest with you.

As an aside, it seems that when people who are dying set goals for themselves, being at a graduation, for example, making it to Christmas, making it to a wedding, seeing a first child, seeing a first grandchild, having a birthday, having a nurse or a neighbor, they seem to find the strength to live for those goals. And, okay, just joking about the nurse and the neighbor since you are probably going to be a bit too weak for that proposition if you are dying, but you get the drift. You create dreams, or remember dreams, you create goals, or remember goals, and you set your sights on them and they seem to help you get past the projected expiration dates.

I think that we simply fight harder, knowing that we will eventually not be able to fight, and often, more often than not, we make those goals, achieve those dreams, and then go fleetingly into the unknown darkness.

Again, I digress.

And so they (daughter and her husband, in case you lost the thread due to my meandering) apparently did all of the necessary things, and lo, behold, my daughter became pregnant. On July 30 of this year, he was born (my grandson, not my son-in-law). Had OncoMan’s prediction been right on, of course, they would have blown it by about three months, but I do not hold that against them. The effort was there, after all, I am sure.

And when my grandson came, he came in grand fashion, a big ol’ nine pounder plus a few ounces. As we said back in my fishing days, he was a keeper. In fact, he was a citation keeper.

(Another aside: why is it that a beer-bellied guy can sit in a boat all day drinking beer and tossing worms over the side of his boat on a hook, catch a nine-pound bass and get a citation for it, perhaps a local record, who knows, and a woman can have a nine-pound baby and only gets to keep the child? You will say that, hey, she gets the big reward: her child. I say she should also get a certificate or a plaque or something. If your baby is over a certain number of pounds or inches long, the hospital should give you an award of some kind reflecting your efforts. You did more to create that huge baby than any fisherman ever did to catch that lunker. That’s all I’m saying. Of course, if a woman has a baby and screams for a certificate, they may take her baby away, but that is under current standards of decorum. I say put the kid on the scales, weigh him, measure him, and if he meets the minimum requirements, mom gets a citation, at the very least. You may debate that once we get that started, the state will want to start issuing licenses to have sex, insist on minimum and maximum weight and length (or you have to throw them back), and you are probably right, so ignore this aside. But, my daughter deserved a citation.)

Some folks claim he was born with a full set of teeth and a complete Armani wardrobe. That is not quite true. The Armani part probably is. I have never been around a situation where a kid-to-be had more showers than this one. Since my daughter lives about three hours away (depending on whether you hit the morning 10-mile parking lot traffic jam or not, depending on how closely you follow the state’s speed limit laws), she got showers there and here. Friends and co-workers and fellow students and faculty gave her showers up there. Down here, she got mom’s shower, mom’s friends’ shower, her own friends’ shower, you get the idea. The kid was in Armani for life.

Or Oshkoshbygosh, one or the other. He had lots of Virginia Tech gear, since that is where grandpa went and where mom is in grad school (Vienna extension). He got some wimpy purple crap from Minnesota, since that is where dad is from, although he tries to hide it if he can (not his dad, my grandson). He got a lot of junk, trust me. Lots of stuff, I mean.

And he is my cancer baby, bottom line. I would not have seen him yet were it not for that hideous diagnosis. Another silver lining, to be sure.

I do not call him that, of course, and never will. He is Scooter. He and I are desperadoes waiting for a train. Or will be. Not right now. He is even less patient than me, it turns out. Right now, he is not waiting for anything. When he wants something, he wants it now. Sort of reminds me of his grandfather and his mother in that regard.

Here is what happened when CancerGramp went to baby sit Scooter:

It started at about 4AM. Everyone told me I was nuts to get up that early in order to be in DC, Woodbridge, actually, by 10:30AM. It is true that this is just a three hour drive, but we have traffic issues both here and in the DC area. I got up. Woke son, who had agreed to come with me. We hit the road.

HE got up, showered, dressed, got in car, and said, let’s go. I had to load a bag with Jevity and beakers and funnel and assorted drugs, of course, along with CDs that I thought we might both tolerate.

We made immediate stop for gasoline top-off and party junk: potato chips and cheese stuff and, um, a few other commodities, and we were on our way. There was the issue of whether my son AND the junk food would both fit, since my car is very small and we bought a bunch of junk, but it worked out, as long as some of the junk was in the ‘trunk’.

Gliding.

The early morning decision proved to be the right one. Right up until we got about 20 miles from my daughter’s house. Where we hit the 11-mile parking lot traffic jam.

Normally, I will admit, I am the kind who would go nuts in such a scenario. Bear in mind that we were new to the area, and knew of no alternative routes, and I do not have NorthStar or whatever they call that stuff. We were stuck. And moved like you move in an 11-mile-long parking lot traffic jam. Very slowly. But no problem. We were alive, we had food, we had some, um, other commodities, we were not in bad shape, really, and my son reminded me that we were fine from time to time, while changing radio stations constantly but, on the other hand, pointing out the occasional fine-looking women in nearby vehicles. He is a good scout, not that I was interested, of course.

One lovely lady (according to me), one old lady (according to son), pulled up beside us and asked if we had a cell phone. I assume she was wanting to call ahead to work to let them know she would be an hour or two late for work. I wanted to assume that she wanted to get my number, but that is too much to ask when you look more like Freddie Krueger than Paul Newman. It was that kind of morning, anyway. But my son had a good point: what if we had answered ‘Yes’? Did she expect us to hand it over to her? Did she expect us to call her job and provide an excuse for her? Hmmm.

Things get weirder and weirder, the closer you get to Washington, DC. I’m soccerfreaks and I approve this message.

We do make it to my daughter’s home with plenty of time to spare, even while stopping for more commodities right before we get there. Here’s the deal, re the commodities: I told my daughter, I will watch your son if you grant me these conditions…(1) I WILL be drinking beer; (2) you have to move the rocking chair from your bedroom to the entertainment room (also known, more formally, as the basement, but tastefully done, I assure you, with a television bigger than some of the walls in my own home; (3) um, I forget the rest of them. They were important at the time, but, in hindsight, they really didn’t add up to much, I suppose.

She, my daughter, bought more junk food for my son. That is good. We are talking frozen pizza and more chips, and who knows what else. He never got to most of it. She bought me nothing, such is her love for her father. I’m just saying.

But she agreed to my conditions, and the rocker was in the basement, I mean entertainment room.

And as we arrived, she was at the door, waiting for us, with Scooter in her hands.

If I have not yet mentioned my greatest fear regarding this event, let me do so. If I have done so, let me do so again, because it happens to be the focus of all that follows: I had one fear. I knew I would not harm my grandson, either purposely, of course, or even accidentally. I knew that I would treat him well, that I would sing to him, that I would talk to him, that I would play with him.

I did not fear changing him, really. I did not fear him spitting up. I did not fear changing him (did I already say that? Okay, maybe a little bit, but not much :).)

I feared him crying and me not being able to stop him. That is what I feared.

What do you do when a nine-week-old kid decides that he is going to cry and you do not have a clue as to why he is doing it or what you can do to stop it, short of committing a felony, which you are hopefully not going to perpetrate on anyone, least of all your one and only grandson?

His mom put him in my lap as soon as I sat down. He was happy. He was gurgling like a happy brook, he was smiling like the sun, he was even laughing like the very breeze rippling through the trees outside. He was one happy camper. And before she left for her extremely important appointments, my daughter fed him, and changed him, and made all right with the world, his world. He was ready for sleep, and I was ready to take my son on in some Wii stuff, since I had never played with that before and was looking forward to it, while listening to some of the CDs I brought, even if they drove my son insane.

And Scooter, all of nine weeks old, decided to derail those plans. His mom gone, he sat in my lap and did some more gurgling and laughing and smiling in the basement (entertainment room), and then decided to try out for a part in the Exorcist.

I admire anyone who does something well. Scooter is no exception. His blood-curdling screams are beyond reproach. I challenge any nine-week old to match him for volume, intensity, and seeming sincerity. I believe, for his age, he is peerless. I worried that the neighbors would call the police to say that a murder was happening in the adjacent townhouse. I worried, really, that he would set a record for youngest person to blow a gasket. He was that much on-point with his screaming attribute.

Now, I had changed him. As soon as his mom left, of course, he dropped a load on me. Not much of one. I changed him. He wore those Velcro-type diapers. It was easy. I took off the old one, I wiped him up with the nearby wipes (for want of a better word) and put the next diaper on him.

No sweat. My son watched. He had been falling asleep but was wide-awake to see how G-Pa was going to handle THIS matter. I was a pro. Or so I thought.

That done, and if you are still reading, you really need a life, I tried to put him in his little porta-crib, and then on the floor among his pillows and stuff, but he would not stop being Jamie Lee Curtis in a Halloween flick: he was screaming with the best of them, with intermittent pauses (as in Halloween movies) for the plot to thicken.

So, I changed him again. (That’s twice now, if you are counting, and I was.) I suspected that maybe I had left some of that tape on his skin, and that this was uncomfortable for him. I changed him. He seemed to settle down, but for only 10 minutes, maybe 15, long enough for my son to decide that he was going upstairs and going to sleep. This is my family.

I tried to feed him (Scooter, not my son) and he seemed to take the bottle (mom’s milk), but then spit it out. Okay, I thought, he is not hungry (wrong!). And so it went.

I sang to him. I talked to him. I rocked him. I let him watch television. Nothing was working. I decided his clothes were too small for him at some point. In other words, at some point I had a baby wearing only a diaper, covered by my attempt at swaddling, which tended to exclude either his toes or his chest, and he was alternately crying (screaming) and seemingly wanting to sleep, and every time I laid him down he told me in no uncertain terms that I had made the incorrect decision.

Finally, I gave him the bottle again. Now, it may be that the bottle had warmed up to room temperature (yes, I had heated it up, but cut it short because I did not want to scald him, folks…it’s been more than 40 years, lighten up on me, eh?) It may be that this time when he spit it out, I did not make the rash assumption that he was done with it. You have to think like your opponent, and I was doing my best to think like a nine-week old. So far, I had been doing a poor job of it, but this time, I got it right. Every time I re-supplied his mouth with the nipple, to be polite about it, he took it in. By the time we were done, he had sucked nearly most of it down. By the time we were done, he was ready for another change, and time for some hard-earned sleep (for one of us, not sure who).

And he went to sleep!

Thirty minutes or so before mom got home.

I dimmed the lights, turned down the television, and rocked quietly, lest I wake the screaming demon. And he slept. I wrapped him up in blankets (quietly) so that he would not freeze to death, and he slept.

When mom came home, she said nothing, but I am sure she was concerned that he had eaten from only one bottle in five hours. I don’t blame her. She woke him, she fed him, she thanked me, and once dad got home and we said hi to him, we left.

I decided that the next time I baby sit Scooter alone, he will be old enough to ride a scooter.